Quotes about use (10000 quotes, page 23)

“To such a one my answer is that I have arrived at a nourishing kernel in that I have learnt that a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith which he ought to make to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. And we will so cling to our Mediator, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” that we will not be led astray by the glib talk of false philosophy or frightened by the superstition of false religion. When we read the inspired books in the light of this wide variety of true doctrines which are drawn from a few words and founded on the firm basis of Catholic belief, let us choose that one which appears as certainly the meaning intended by the author. But if this is not clear, then at least we should choose an interpretation in keeping with the context of Scripture and in harmony with our faith. But if the meaning cannot be studied and judged by the context of Scripture, at least we should choose only that which our faith demands. For it is one thing to fail to recognize the primary meaning of the writer, and another to depart from the norms of religious belief. If both these difficulties are avoided, the reader gets full profit from his reading."”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

I, xxi, 41. Modern translation by J.H. Taylor
De Genesi ad Litteram

Wisdom , Books , Faith , Religion

“No doubt the great majority of them are in the cemetery long ago, and I suppose the rest of us will join them before long. Speaking for myself I am willing; in fact I believe I have been willing ever since I was eighteen years old; not urgent, but willing, merely willing.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 288

“If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done. The American experiment in self-government gives work and purpose to each generation.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Bloody Sunday Speech (March 2015)

“This is pure ends-justify-the-means logic. And the means are pushing falsehood. The notion here seems to be that Trump is helping America avoid perdition, and thus must be given leeway to lie; if we didn’t allow him to lie, the left would continue to do so, and then they’d win and drive us straight into Hell. But that suggests that truth no longer has the capacity to drive voters or Americans. If that’s true, republicanism is finished as a principle – if we can only lie to voters to get them to vote for us, that undermines the decency of republicanism altogether.”

Ben Shapiro (1984) American journalist and attorney

2016, Is Truth Becoming Irrelevant to Conservatives? (December 5, 2016)

Truth , Lie , Hell , Help

“I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour and every moment of our lives, if we will only tune in and remain so.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

How to Search for Truth, letter to Hubert W. Pelt (1930-02-24)

Love , God , Nature , Thinking

“Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our body.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

Quoted in Michaud, Stephen; Aynesworth, Hugh (1999) The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy (Paperback; revised ed.). Irving, Texas: Authorlink Press. pg. 320

People

“They must be either for or against us. Distrust them and you make them your enemies, place confidence in them, and you engage them by every dear and honorable tie to the interest of the country, who extends to them equal rights and privileges with white men.”

Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) American general and politician, 7th president of the United States

In New Orleans, Louisiana, 1814. As quoted in The Life of Andrew Jackson https://web.archive.org/web/20111029143820/http://home.nas.com/lopresti/ps7.htm (1967), by John Spencer Bassett, Archon Books. p. 156-157.
1810s

Men , Confidence , Country

“I never thought of him as a vampire, ever. I mean, the blood is the life. That's one thing you have to bear in mind. And it is for all of us, isn't it? Here's a man who is immortal. Here is a man who, through being immortal, is a lost soul. Here is a man who experiences the loneliness of evil, something he can't control, who wants to die but there is a force in him, a malefic force, which drives him to do these terrible things. I said earlier the character is heroic, based on the real man - a war leader and a national hero, I may say, in Romania to this day - Vlad the Impaler. Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic - so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic. And there's, of course, the obvious association with the bite in a sexual sense, if you like. So I tried to put all those particular characteristics into the character. It appears that I succeeded.”

Christopher Lee (1922–2015) British actor and singer

Listen Back To A 1990 Interview With Actor Christopher Lee http://www.npr.org/2015/06/12/413936419/listen-back-to-a-1990-interview-with-actor-christopher-lee (1990)

Life , Women , War , Soul

“A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Official Announcement http://www.reaganlibrary.com/reagan/speeches/intent.asp of being a candidate for U.S. President (13 November 1979)
1970s

Affliction

“I saw, all of a sudden, an odd-looking bird making its way through the water to the opposite bank, followed by a great commotion. I found it was a domestic fowl which had managed to escape impending doom in the galley by jumping overboard and was now trying frantically to swim across. It had almost gained the bank when the clutches of its relentless pursuers closed on it, and it was brought back in triumph, gripped by the neck. I told the cook I would not have any meat for dinner. I really must give up animal food. We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us ⎯ in fact, any one who does not join in is dubbed a crank. … if, after our pity is aroused, we persist in throttling our feelings simply in order to join others in their preying upon life, we insult all that is good in us. I have decided to try a vegetarian diet.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Glimpses of Bengal http://www.spiritualbee.com/tagore-book-of-letters/ (1921)

Life , Food , Way , Feeling

“We have no choice, we people of the United States, as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world. That has been determined to us by fate, by the march of events. We have to play that part. All that we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Address at Mechanics' Pavilion San Francisco May 13 1903 books.google.de http://books.google.de/books?id=zSJNPOphC_MC&pg=PA98
Quoted in The Audacity of Hope (2006) by Barack Obama, p. 282 as follows: The United States of America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play a great part in the world … It must play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.
1910s

Fate , People , World , Parting

“War against men are known to fewer and fewer of us. Mandatory conscription for the Vietnam War ended the year before I was born. Since then, the United States has effectively created a class of professional contract soldiers who do the government's fighting in faraway lands. Average men know more about collegiate basketball than they know about a given overseas conflict.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 118
The Way of Men (2012)

Men , War , Fight

“If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves “Christian,” patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 4

Life , Question , Problem

“The Real is therefore simultaneously both the hard impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the Real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious; it is something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature… like a traumatic event constructed backwards.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

190
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World , Nature , Universe , Time

“I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.”

Alban Berg (1885–1935) Austrian composer

Quoted in Reich, Willi (1971). Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, p. 34. Translated by Leo Black.

Law , Music , Way , Thinking

“But history tells us that true progress is only possible where governments exist to serve their people, and not the other way around.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Cape Town University Address (June 2013)

People , Way , History

“Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war—for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Quoted in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics http://books.google.com/books?id=DKG-FXj_HNYC&q=%22lots+of+people+who+complained+about+us+receiving+the+MBE+received+theirs+for+heroism+in+the+war+for+killing+people+we+received+ours+for+entertaining+other+people+I%27d+say+we+deserve+ours+more%22&pg=PA33#v=onepage (1969)

War , People

“I am old, but the word to me means familiar, comfortable. Accustomed after long and venerable use. Not dilapidated and useless.”

Sherwood Smith (1951) American fantasy and science fiction writer

Treason's Shore (Inda #4, 2009)

“I was really ugly [circa 8 a 10 years old] and had an admiration complex for Christi [her beautiful sister]. They sent us tot the ous of senora Maria a Campos for instruction... I asked about the mysteries of the Bible, and I think I behaved badly so they sent me to a retreat. It was the usual thing: "to dedicate oneself mor to God".... it was a house where one spent about fifteen days... I asked the priest so many questions about how Christ was born, and was the virgin really a virgin, that they threw me out.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

9 September 1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My life', p. 64

God , Beauty , Question , Thinking

“No! The other thing, that God brought us together for a reason.”

Vera Farmiga (1973) American actress

As quoted in " The Conjuring 2013 https://movquotes.com/8231/" as Lorraine Warren.

God

“On the topic of supplying weapons to the Eighth Route Army, this needs the decision from the USSR; it is of the USSR's opinion that, had the weapons been supplied, instead of helping you(Chinese Communist), it would only harm you…. Because it would help to deteriorate the relationship between KMT and CCP, and give excuses for the KMT to isolate and apply sanction on Yan'an. Finaly,…Comintern made a gift of US$300,000 to CCP.”

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) Bulgarian politician

Xu Jehhow:(Biography of Wang Jiaxiang), edition 1996, page 296-297.
On China

Decision , Help

“There are a few of us — madmen all! — who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life… We may go blind before we see it, that's the haunting”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Heretic (1968)

Love , Life , Truth , Star

“When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 32

Men

“Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us — in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world — this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men , World , Law , Confidence

“The Germans themselves I should regard as aboriginal, and not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse. For in former times, it was not by land but on shipboard that those who sought to emigrate would arrive; and the boundless and, so to speak, hostile ocean beyond us, is seldom entered by a sail from our world.”

Tacitus book Germania

Source: Germania (98), Chapter 2

Hostility , World , Time

“The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, and literature, and art, and all of that – to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding at least in part in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Dreams , Art , Way , Behavior

“I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

"Information Loss in Black Holes" http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171 (July 2005)

Disappointment , Travel , Universe , Science

“For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

Health , Age , School , Cars

“…a professor in one of the great female colleges. That odious form is common, and I submit and use it, though it offends me as much as it would to say female brickbat or female snow-storm or female geography.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 273

“It is important to focus more on what we need than on what we want, because much of what we want unnecessarily complicates our lives. The answer is to approach the Divinity in the mood of. "Thy will be done. Use me for Your purposes." Even higher than that sentiment is to request that God remove our free will so that we cannot even exercise it. We are then fully available for the Lord's service.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 4: Fire and Brimstone, Horns and Tail, p. 67

God , Exercises , Mood

“As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Relatively Einstein http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/relativelyeinstein.shtml episode 3, "Fantasy Physics" (18 January 2005); the Discworld version of this statement appears in Night Watch (2002)
General sources

“The tremendous and highly complex industrial development which went on with ever accelerated rapidity during the latter half of the nineteenth century brings us face to face, at the beginning of the twentieth, with very serious social problems. The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, First Annual Message to Congress (1901)

Law , Problem , Change , Wealth

“Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.”

Voltaire Dictionnaire philosophique

Que les supplices des criminels soient utiles. Un homme pendu n’est bon à rien, et un homme condamné aux ouvrages publics sert encore la patrie, et est une leçon vivante.
"Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws," Dictionnaire philosophique (1785-1789)
The Dictionnaire philosophique was a posthumously published collection of articles combining the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (published under various editions and titles from 1764 to 1777), the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (published from 1770 to 1774), articles written for the Encyclopédie and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, the manuscript known as l'Opinion sur l'alphabet and a number of previously published miscellaneous articles.
Citas

Country

“All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence… logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

'Vagueness' http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/vagueness.htm, first published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1 June, 1923
1920s

Life , Imagination , Study

“And yet, in our rush to respond to a very real and novel set of threats, the risk of government overreach -- the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security -- also became more pronounced. […] intelligence agencies cannot function without secrecy, which makes their work less subject to public debate. Yet there is an inevitable bias not only within the intelligence community, but among all of us who are responsible for national security, to collect more information about the world, not less. So in the absence of institutional requirements for regular debate -- and oversight that is public, as well as private or classified -- the danger of government overreach becomes more acute. And this is particularly true when surveillance technology and our reliance on digital information is evolving much faster than our laws.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Review of Signals Intelligence Speech (June 2014)

World , Law , Intelligence , Communication

“It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us. Awake, we never imagine anything; we merely alter, vary, or transpose. We give another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around us, and obtain another pattern; but not one of us has ever added one tiniest piece of new glass to the toy.”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

Dreams http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/jjdrm10.txt

Imagination , Sleep

“While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind – in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a handicap. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 11-12

Personality

“WE ARE COMPELLED, OUR FAITH URGING us, to believe and to hold—and we do firmly believe and simply confess—that there is one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins”
Unam sanctam ecclesiam catholicam et ipsam apostolicam urgente fide credere cogimur et tenere, nosque hanc frmiter credimus et simpliciter confitemur, extra quam nec salus est, nec remissio peccatorum,

Pope Boniface VIII Unam sanctam

Unam sanctam (1302)

Faith

“First, the shootings in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, and the protests, then the targeting of police by the shooter here -- an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred. All of it has left us wounded, and angry, and hurt. It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened. And although we know that such divisions are not new -- though they have surely been worse in even the recent past -- that offers us little comfort.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

Democracy , Past , Hurt

“I wish one and all long and happy lives, no matter what may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! Don’t smoke cigarettes. Cigars, however, are good for you … Firearms are also good for you … Gunpowder has zero fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

Happiness

““The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”… “Thank you for using me,” she said to Constant, “even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.””

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Epilogue “Reunion with Stony” (pp. 310-311)
The Sirens of Titan (1959)

“The foundation upon which our nation stands is much richer and firmer than the sympathies that may occasionally divide us. And we never know this more truly than in Christmas time. In good times or in bad, under clear skies or under the shadow of uncertainty, the Christmas message is the imperishable one of joy, hope and brotherhood.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Christmas message to overseas Filipinos (25 December 1979)
1965

Hope , Time , Joy , Christmas

“[T]he most important position in a democracy is not the office of the President. The most important office is the office of citizen, because if you have citizens who are informed and know about other countries, and recognize that if we provide foreign aid to some distant country in Africa, that ultimately may make us healthier. And if you have a citizenry that recognizes that even if I have to pay slightly more in taxes — which nobody likes paying taxes -- but if I do, maybe I can provide that young child who lives in a poorer neighborhood an opportunity for a better life. And then because she has a job and a better life, she can pay taxes, and then everybody has more, and the society is better off. If you don't have citizens like that, then you're going to get leaders who think very narrowly and you'll be disappointed. So the job — one thing I always tell young people, don't just think that you elect somebody and then you expect them to solve all your problems and then you just sit back and complain when it doesn't happen. You have to work as a citizen also to provide the leaders the space and the direction to do the right thing. It's just as important for you to challenge ignorance or discrimination or people who are always thinking in terms of war”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

it's just as important for you to do that as the President because I don't care how good the person, the leader you elect is, if the people want something different. In a democracy, at least, that's what's going to happen.
2016, Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall (March 2016)

Life , War , People , Disappointment

“Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question—he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates... Equally inferior—& perhaps even more so—is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro... In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it white, Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take—& that is to prevent admixture as completely & determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour-line & the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line. I am in accord with the most vehement & vociferous Alabaman or Mississippian on that point … Other racial questions are wholly different in nature—involving wide variations unconnected with superiority or inferiority. Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world—an "inferior" of any sort... & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences—& even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer's physical aspect froms a constant reminder of his outside origin. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the color-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically.... As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race-differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without telling him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception. If they were wise in their campaign to get rid of Jewish cultural influences (& a great deal can be said for such a campaign, when the dominance of the Aryan tradition is threatened as in Germany & New York City), they would not emphasize the separatism of the Jew but would strive to make him give up his separate culture & lose himself in the German people. It wouldn't hurt Germany—or alter its essential physical type—to take in all the Jews it now has.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.
Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (22 November 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 77
Non-Fiction, Letters

People , Youth , World , Family

“I used to act dumb. It was an act. I am 26 years old, and that act is no longer cute. It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who looked up to me. I know now that I can make a difference, that I have the power to do that. I have been thinking that I want to do different things when I am out of here. I have become much more spiritual. God has given me this new chance.”

Paris Hilton (1981) American socialite

As quoted at ABC News (11 June 2007) http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3264588

God , Girl , Thinking , Chance

“When I was little, my dad used to tell me, "Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose."”

John Green book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Will Grayson, p. 1 (opening words)
Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010)

“Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order of word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the straitjacket of a uniform, even though fully aware of their absurdity, an officer will carry out his instructions lie a sleep-walker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

Lie , School , Exercises , Decision

“It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more, and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Speech at Chicago (1858)

Thinking

“There was once a millionaire who bought an infinite number of pairs of shoes and, whenever he bought a pair of shoes, he also bought a pair of socks. We can make a selection choosing one out of each pair of shoes, because we can choose always the right shoe or always the left shoe. Thus, so far as the shoes are concerned, selections exist. But, as regards the socks, where there is no distinction of right and left, we cannot use this rule of selection.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), pp. 93-93

Shoe

“This possibility, of always drawing from the pristine fount of our own nature, that makes us feel ourselves no more a race, no mere variety of man, but one of Manhood's primal branches, — 'tis this that ever has bestowed on us great men and spiritual heroes, as to whom we have no need to trouble whether fashioners of foreign fatherless civilisations are able to understand and prize them; whilst we again, inspired by the deeds and gifts of our forefathers, and gazing with unclouded eye, are able to rightly estimate those foreigners, and value them according to the spirit of pure Humanity indwelling in their work.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Know Thyself (1881)

Men , Feeling , Fashion , Understanding

“A psychologist said, “They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections’ of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn’t real, but that it’s reversed.””

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 13 (p. 213)

Reality

“All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”

Henri Bergson book Creative Evolution

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271

Death , Time , Animals

“(On 1941.7.2 Dimitrov handed Molotov a proposal, suggesting a help fund of 2 millions US Dollars be given to Chinese Communist Party. After discussion, the Soviet Communist Party had approved the sum of One million US Dollars.) Dimitrov then wrote to Molotov:"It is very important to let Chinese comrades to have at least half of the sum as soon as possible, we believe it is necessary to deliver the fund using illegal methods by planes through Mongolia.”

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) Bulgarian politician

Dimitrov Diaries
On China

Help

“There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book III, Ch. 2
Attributed

“Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: "You believe in incomprehensible, contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to; now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so." Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth. (Translation from Norman Lewis Torrey: Les Philosophes. The Philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modern Democracy. Capricorn Books, 1961, pp. 277-8)”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Questions sur les miracles (1765)
Widely used paraphrase: "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities".

Life , God , Fate , People

“The struggle of today, is not altogether for today — it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, First State of the Union address (1861)

Future

“All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one. The beautiful is the ideal; but ideals, with us as in civilized Europe, have long been wavering. There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his Niece Sofia Alexandrovna, Geneva, January 1, 1868. Ethel Golburn Mayne (1879), Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to His Family and Friends http://www.archive.org/stream/lettersoffyodorm00dostiala/lettersoffyodorm00dostiala_djvu.txt, Dostoevsky's Letters XXXIX, p. 136.

Love , World , Beauty , Christ

“I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just… you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

The Atheism Tapes (2004)

Feeling

“In previous armies, soldiers used their time to clean their weapons and stock up on ammunition. Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at any moment.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

"The Movement of Movements" (2004) " The Hourglass of the Zapatistas http://books.google.com/books?id=gh052B6W1HYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=movement+of+movements&hl=en&sa=X&ei=sBSVT5CXC4OC8QSUzfSiBA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=In%20previous%20armies%2C%20soldiers%20used%20their%20time%20to%20clean%20their%20weapons%20and%20stock%20up%20on%20ammunition.%20Our%20weapons%20are%20words%2C%20and%20we%20may%20need%20our%20arsenal%20at%20any%20moment.&f=false"

Time

“There's no such thing as chance;
And what to us seems merest accident
Springs from the deepest source of destiny.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act II, sc. iii
Wallenstein (1798), Part II - Wallensteins Tod (The Death of Wallenstein)

Spring , Chance

“That's why I spit it in my songs so sweet
Like a photo of your granny's picture
Now that you're gone it hit us
Super hard on Thankgiving and Christmas, this can't be right”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Family Business
Lyrics, The College Dropout (2004)

Photo , Christmas

“The U. S. military has performed valiantly and brilliantly in Iraq. Our troops have done all that we have asked them to do and more. But no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war, nor settle the grievances in the hearts of the combatants.
It is my firm belief that the responsible course of action - for the United States, for Iraq, and for our troops - is to oppose this reckless escalation and to pursue a new policy. This policy that I've laid out is consistent with what I have advocated for well over a year, with many of the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and with what the American people demanded in the November election.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience, is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried and failed policy opposed by generals and experts, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and many of the Iraqis themselves.
It is time for us to fundamentally change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back. And it is time to refocus America's efforts on the challenges we face at home and the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Floor Statement on Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007 (30 January 2007)
2007

War , People , Home , Effort

“As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict... In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable... Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence.... There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary.... In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent... If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life... For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life & remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it, hence (in the last few years) make allowances for it, & do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c. &c. so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them, or enter warmly & subjectively into all phases of their aesthetic expression.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 307
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life , Books , Age , World

“He went on to speak of the manner in which slavery was treated by the Constitution. The word 'slave' is no where used; the supply of slaves was to be prohibited after 1808; they stopped the spread of it in the territories; seven of the states abolished it. He argued very conclusively that it was then regarded as an evil which would eventually be got rid of, and that they desired, once rid of it, to have nothing in the constitution to remind them of it. The Republicans go back to first principles and deal with it as a wrong. Mason, of Va., said openly that the framers of our government were anti-slavery. Hammond of S. C., said 'Washington set this evil example'. Bully Brooks said: 'At the time the Constitution was formed, no one supposed slavery would last till now.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

We stick to the policy of our fathers.
1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Evil , Time

“It is not unique to Africa -- corruption exists all over the world, including in the United States. But here in Africa, corruption drains billions of dollars from economies that can't afford to lose billions of dollars -- that's money that could be used to create jobs and build hospitals and schools. And when someone has to pay a bribe just to start a business or go to school, or get an official to do the job they’re supposed to be doing anyway -- that’s not “the African way.””

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

It undermines the dignity of the people you represent.
2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)

Money , People , World , School

“The highest of all holidays in the Satanic religion is the date of one's own birth. Every man is a god if he chooses to recognize himself as one. So, the Satanist celebrates his own birthday as the most important holiday of the year. Despite the fact that some of us may not have been wanted, or at least were not particularly planned, we're glad, even if no one else is, that we're here! You should give yourself a pat on the back, buy yourself whatever you want, treat yourself like the king (or god) that you are, and generally celebrate your birthday with as much pomp and ceremony as possible. After one's own birthday, the two major Satanic holidays are Walpurgisnacht and Halloween (or All Hallows' Eve). The solstices and equinoxes are also celebrated as holidays, as they herald the first day of the seasons.”

Anton LaVey book The Satanic Bible

The Satanic Bible (1969)

God , Religion , Birthday , Birth

“A consciousness of the fact that war means practically total destruction is the reason, I think, for the rising tide to prevent what seems such a senseless procedure. I understand that it is perhaps difficult for some people, whose lives have been lived with a sense of the need for military development, to envisage the possibility of being no longer needed. But the average citizen is beginning to think more and more of the need to develop machinery to settle difficulties in the world without destruction or the use of atomic bombs.”

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day

20 December 1961
My Day (1935–1962)

War , People , World , Understanding

“The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not primarily of objects to be used. As a subject, each component of the universe is capable of having rights.”

Thomas Berry (1914–2009) American priest

Appendix 2, p. 149
Evening Thoughts

Communication , Universe

“Americans don't go around carrying guns with the idea they're using them to influence other Americans. There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

California Legislature Stunned By Invasion Of Armed "Black Panthers" https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2202&dat=19670503&id=ClcmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZP8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1072,5010951&hl=en, Gettysburg Times (3 May 1967)
1960s

Idea

“But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 25.

People , Nature

“My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’, which is an inverse process – where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e. g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something – in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the film-maker, said, "Every object conceals another"”

Brian Eno (1948) English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist

a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts).
December 15, 1995, p. 178
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Music

“When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. I know that these natural phenomena are more important & significant than the special & tenuous moods which so absorb me, & that an art based on them is greater than any which fantasy could evoke—but I'm simply not big enough to react to them in the sensitive way necessary for artistic response & literary use. God in heaven! I'd certainly be glad enough to be a Shakespeare or Balzac or Turgeniev if I could!... I respect realism more than any other form of art—but must reluctantly concede that, through my own limitations, it does not form a medium which I can adequately use.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffman Price (29 September 1933), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life , God , Art , Way

“All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the “lower” toward the “higher,” the “unformed” toward the “formed,” … “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge,” a “mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium. … The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the “prima materia” up to man—a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love. Too little attention has been given to the peculiar relation between this idea of love and the principle of the “agon,” the ambitious contest for the goal, which dominated Greek life in all its aspects—from the Gymnasium and the games to dialectics and the political life of the Greek city states. Even the objects try to surpass each other in a race for victory, in a cosmic “agon” for the deity. Here the prize that will crown the victor is extreme: it is a participation in the essence, knowledge, and abundance of “being.” Love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion this great “agon” of all things for the deity.
Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love. The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God. …
There is no longer any “highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements. …
Thus the picture has shifted immensely. This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 85-88

Love , Life , Men , God

“My task is to throw a light on that which we must always love and revere, of which no subsequent knowledge can rob us: man in his greatness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous)

Love , Knowledge , Light

“O Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia—what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, ‘Somebody up there likes me.’ And no longer can a tyrant say, ‘God wants this or that to happen, and anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 10 “An Age of Miracles” (p. 215; epigram)

God , Truth , Fools , Soul

“Let us beware in ourselves, my beloved, and realize that even if Gehenna is subject to a limit, the taste of its experience is most terrible, and the extent of its bounds escapes our very understanding. Let us strive all the more to partake of the taste of God's love for the sake of perpetual reflection on Him, and let us not (have) experience of Gehenna through neglect.”

Isaac of Nineveh (640–700) Eastern Orthodox saint

XLI, 1, p. 180
‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI

Love , God , Understanding

“Movement will fail sooner than usefulness.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations

“Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable conflicts, while the others died happy and peaceful at an advanced age. If a painless death, leaving behind beautiful progeny, is the sign of a happy natural state, then the endings of the other arts show us the example of just such a happy natural state: they sink slowly, and with their dying eyes they behold their fairer offspring, who lift up their heads in bold impatience. The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left a great void whose effects were felt profoundly, far and wide; as once Greek sailors in Tiberius' time heard the distressing cry 'the god Pan is dead' issuing from a lonely island, now, throughout the Hellenic world, this cry resounded like an agonized lament: 'Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Mit dem Tode der griechischen Tragödie dagegen entstand eine ungeheure, überall tief empfundene Leere; wie einmal griechische Schiffer zu Zeiten des Tiberius an einem einsamen Eiland den erschütternden Schrei hörten "der grosse Pan ist todt": so klang es jetzt wie ein schmerzlicher Klageton durch die hellenische Welt: "die Tragödie ist todt! Die Poesie selbst ist mit ihr verloren gegangen! Fort, fort mit euch verkümmerten, abgemagerten Epigonen! Fort in den Hades, damit ihr euch dort an den Brosamen der vormaligen Meister einmal satt essen könnt!"
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 54

Death , God , Age , World

“Chons, on rhythm guitar, had long black hair and blue eyes and was the first person I ever met who said she never ate meat, and when she told me that, I never ate it again either. Best thing that ever happened to me. All it took was the mere suggestion. Nobody else was vegetarian that I knew of, but I started to think of meat-eating as a very weird practice and secretly regarded meat-eaters with distaste, almost contempt. Why would anyone kill an animal if they didn’t need to? I learned to live and associate with “the majority,” but never respected them. I got used to having this lack of regard for 97 percent of the population.”

Chrissie Hynde (1951) Rock singer-songwriter and founder of Pretenders

Reckless (2015)

Thinking , Learning , Animals , Personality

“Although no conclusive proof exists that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings, and in some regions their use has brought about economic growth which has helped to resolve problems, there remain a number of significant difficulties which should not be underestimated. In many places, following the introduction of these crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners due to “the progressive disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of the exploited lands, are obliged to withdraw from direct production”. The most vulnerable of these become temporary labourers, and many rural workers end up moving to poverty-stricken urban areas. The expansion of these crops has the effect of destroying the complex network of ecosystems, diminishing the diversity of production and affecting regional economies, now and in the future. In various countries, we see an expansion of oligopolies for the production of cereals and other products needed for their cultivation. This dependency would be aggravated were the production of infertile seeds to be considered; the effect would be to force farmers to purchase them from larger producers.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

§ 134
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home

Problem , Loss , Future , Help

“This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

“Our object now is to strengthen the ties that bind us to other nations. There may be a great many countries in the world, but there is only one civilization, and if a nation is to achieve progress, she must be a part of this civilization. The Ottoman Empire began to decline the day when, proud of her success against the West, she cut the ties that bound her to the European nations.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

Speech to the press (29 October 1923), quoted in Vakur Versan, 'The Kemalist Reform of Turkish Law and Its Impact', in Jacob M. Landau (ed.), Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984), p. 247

World , Success , Parting , Country

“Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagination that we can catch him out.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 115 (Vintage 2003)

Imagination , Time

“We thus have a kind of see-saw: first, pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 9: Power over opinion

Communication , Parting

“Till I had you I didn't know that I was missing out. Had to grow up and see the world through different shades of doubt. Give me one more chance to dream again. One more chance to feel again through your young heart. If only for one day let me try. I wanna see Christmas through your eyes. I want everything to be the way it used to be. Back to being a child again, thinking the world was mine... I see the rain, you see the rainbow hiding in the clouds. Never afraid to let your love show. Won't you show me how. Wanna learn how to believe again. Find the innocence in me again, through your young heart. Help me find a way, help me try. I wanna see Christmas through your eyes. I want everything to be the way it used to be. Back to being a child again, thinking the world was kind. I wanna see Christmas, Christmas through your eyes.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Christmas Through Your Eyes
2007, 2008

Love , World , Dreams , Way

“We had enough of people who think like you, that they know what god wants and that they've got god on their side. That they can tell us what to do or what to think in this way.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created
2000s, 2007

God , People , Way , Thinking

“After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest that the USA bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline.”

Dmitry Rogozin (1963) Russian diplomat

Отправка на МКС астронавтов с помощью батута... http://rostovdrive.ru/news/detail.php?ID=137798, RostovDrive.ru, 29.04.2014
Russian Diplomat Twitter-Threatens to Fly a Bomber Into Romania http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/05/russian-diplomat-twitter-threatens-to-fly-a-bomber-into-romania/362032/, The wire, May 10, 2014
Original: Проанализировав санкции против нашего космопрома, предлагаю США доставлять своих астронавтов на МКС с помощью батута.

“They [the best of the Masai] had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

Part IV, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

People

“Bishops should despise this world and inspire others by their example to seek after heavenly things. But now you are corrupted by ambition beyond all the rest of mankind; and one of them not content with holding the first episcopal see in Germany has dared without my approval to claim my golden sceptre, which I carry to signify my royal will, in order that he might use it as his pastoral staff.”

Charlemagne (748–814) King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Quoted in Notker's The Deeds of Charlemagne (translated 2008 by David Ganz)

World

“As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience, and of the press, it will be worth defending.”

Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) American general and politician, 7th president of the United States

First Inaugural Address (4 March 1829).
1820s

People , Personality

“The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and moralism expressing itself in the guise of religion. No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer homes to its message!”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Source: Christianity and Power Politics (1936), Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman"

Age , World , Religion , Hope

“I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like détente when there’s a good English phrase for it — cold war.”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

As quoted in Newsweek (19 January 1976)

War

“God works, and therefore we work; God is with- us, and therefore we are with God, and stand on His side.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 122

God

“What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. …There are great truths to tell, if we had either the courage to announce them or the temper to receive them.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Book 4, Chap. 1.
Books, Coningsby (1844)

Men , Truth , World , Beauty

“Above all, in this speech, as in so many others, he taught a lesson in wise kindliness and charity; an indispensable lesson to us of to-day, for if we approach the work of reform in a spirit of vindictiveness-in a spirit of reckless disregard for the rights of others, or of hatred for men because they are better off than ourselves—we are sure in the end to do not good but damage to all mankind, and especially to those whose especial champions we pro-fess ourselves to be.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Men

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955)

Death , Wisdom , Way , Knowledge

“I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he’d take it away. So he'll be like: 'You think this is going pretty well?”

Hugh Laurie (1959) British actor, comedian, writer, musician and director

Then he'll go and send down some big disaster.
Stargazing: Heather's Angry, Jane is Ill, Hugh is Anxious Kansas City Star, Wed, Oct. 31, 2007

God , Idea , Thinking

“It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit!”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267).
(another and longer version:) What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my paintings. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another
Richard Friendenthal (1963, p. 256).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Fate , Passion

“Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Sex , Nature , Childhood

“Slavery is wrong in its effect upon white people and free labor; it is the only thing that threatens the Union. It makes what Senator Seward has been much abused for calling an 'irrepressible conflict'. When they get ready to settle it, we hope they will let us know. Public opinion settles every question here, any policy to be permanent must have public opinion at the bottom, something in accordance with the philosophy of the human mind as it is. The property basis will have its weight. The love of property and a consciousness of right or wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often make a man's course seem crooks, his conduct a riddle.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Love , People , Hope , Question

Quotes about use page 23

Quotes about use
page 23